Advancing technology, particularly the technologies of personal computing, optical scanning, desktop publishing, printing, and color copying, has greatly simplified the act of counterfeiting. A person with a modest personal computer system, scanner and printer can very quickly create a reasonably high-quality reproduction that can often be convincingly represented and accepted as an original document. Therefore, many original documents now incorporate anticounterfeiting features, such as, for example, holograms, watermarks, embedded security threads, microprinting, foil stamping, and many other features.
Incorporating such anticounterfeiting features into an original document can be costly and time consuming. Original documents that include security features are typically more expensive to produce than documents that do not include such features. Further, the process of incorporating one or more new security features into an original document may take several years. The security features must be selected, a new version of the original document designed, and the original documents containing the new security features must then be printed and placed into circulation. By the time this process is completed the particular security features may already be obsolete, or may be compromised or convincingly reproduced in a relatively short time period. In either case, the authenticity of all original documents incorporating the compromised security feature is suspect, and the original documents must be again redesigned to include new security features.
Therefore, what is needed in the art is an improved method and apparatus for verifying the authenticity of original documents.